Sex-segregation is something that has so much potential to benefit women if used and implemented correctly. Which it rarely is, as the original NYT article shows.

First of all, I agree with Ms. Mead in that it is complete bull that boys and girls "learn differently." Girls don't need specialized, gender-specific programs for math any more than boys need it for English. The differences in grades in genders in different subjects has more to do with societal expectations than neurobiology. Boys are expected to be better at math. Girls are expected to be better at English. It's not surprising that many students follow these expectations.

However, I also don't think that sex-segregation is necessarily a bad thing, even in high school. As long as schools stay out of teaching and encouraging gender normativity (which I know may not be socially possible), it could result in students who are less afraid to speak out and be "smart" in subjects that don't follow society's concepts as appropriate.

Put another way, most students recognize that in the class, there will be students who are really good, some who will be really bad, and the rest will do okay. In math classes, I believe that girls relinquish the recognition of being one of the "really smart" ones to boys because that is what is expected. If there aren't boys there, girls may be more willing to take on the role of being "great" at math.

Personally, this was exactly how it worked with me. I was never afraid of being smart, but I hated negative attention from boys for getting better grades than they did. Therefore, I never let on that I was actually really, really good at math and let them think they were better than I was all through high school. Then, even though I went to a co-ed college, my graduating class had, for whatever reason, very few men. Most of my classes were all women. It was in these classes that I found my voice and became proud of my intelligence, no matter how it made me look to the opposite sex. I can't help but think that sex-segregation in high school would have helped me gain self-respect and pride a lot sooner.

It gets so frustrating to watch as something like sex segregating schools that could potentially do so much good is wielded like a weapon against those it could be helping.

Exactly! thank you for writing this Ann! I am a senior at a women's college in the US and my WOMEN AND GENDER STUDIES PROFESSOR had us read the NY Times article for class yesterday. I was the only person in the class with questions like- why aren't we talking about the fact that we live in a patriarchal society? where are all us queer gender-trangressing kids in Sax's schools? The girls with ADD? The future child-free women? future male meditators and quiet shy poets? I am extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to attend an all-women's institution, (but even that label is deceiving because, as you point out, gender is a spectrum!!!). It has been a wonderful experience to have different models, discourses and ideologies in and around me for four years, which has taught me to fully beleive in myself and my community, partly because I have literally seen millions of examples of what we can do, and helped me to see oppressive paradigms that are so invisibilized in our patriarchal society. Sax, and the NY Times for that matter, needs to take a women and gender studies class and get his sex/gender vocab and 'science' straight.

Proof that gender based education is not that answer can be found in Mead's statement: "And they ignore the fact that variation among both males and females often far exceeds average differences between the genders" In other words the intra-gender differences are greater than the inter-gender differences. That's enough proof for me that the NYT article is BS.

I taught 3rd graders for a while, and as Sara Mead says in her rebuttal, splitting up children by the basis of their pace and learning development (leveling) will go a whole lot farther than making separations based on gender. Personally, I'm not a big fan of leveling except maybe in reading small reading circles. I have always thought that "higher level" kids have something to offer the "lower level" kids and vice versa. I think sometimes the "level" label can be damaging because of the stigma and lowered expectations for some, and it often will illicit teasing from other students. I've also seen that when kids get labeled with a certain level it becomes harder for them do advance later on and it will sometimes serve to discourage the kids from performing better as well. My other problem with leveling is that the label usually gets put on the child when they are very young, usually first or second grade, sometimes 3rd. At this young an age it is almost impossible to tell how well the child will go on to learn. Often at such a young age, differences in learning are not so much a product of being a "slow learner" but simply a product of age differences and brain development. Children's ages in, say 3rd grade can range anywhere from 6 years to 10 years. (I've had children between that age range). So despite being in the same grade, an 8 year old's brain is more developed than a 6 year old's, and this will effect learning and maybe put the 6yr old behind the 8yr old in terms of reading and math development since there are certain skills that can't be learned or developed until a child's brain reaches a certain point in development. So, it doesn't mean that the 6 year old is a poorer learner than the 8yr old, because for a 6 year old the child may be perfectly normal yet, despite being at normal level, the younger student might get leveled into a lower group simply because of age. (I've seen this happened many times as well to perfectly intelligent kids)

So I'm not a big advocate of the leveling of kids, but I do realize that at certain times it can be beneficial. But, because I don't so much agree with leveling, which is a common practice in schools, I am even MORE opposed to gender segregation. Sorry to get a bit off topic with the leveling rant, but just like splitting kids up based on "ability" bothers me, it bothers me even more that people would even think this would be a good idea to separate kids based on gender. And to be honest, and I don't mean to make this a boy vs. girl thing, but in my classes and on standardized tests my girls have always outperformed my boys, year after year. And I'm one of those teachers who tries to keep things equal as far as giving equal time to both genders to speak in front of the class, be called on, be helpers, etc. Still, it's not just my class in which the girls outperform, because other teachers have told me this is the case with their class and with other grades as well. I'm not sure why this is, but, if anything, teachers need to be trying to understand why boys are not performing at their best (as opposed to separating out girls because girls "lag" behind boys, which is, in my experience just not true). I don't think the answer though, is separating students by gender. In fact, that will most definitely make things worse. Not to mention it's a policy based on gender stereotypes, not actual science. Again, sorry this post got so long.

"School should not be about promoting traditional gender identities -- it should be about helping every child learn in the way that suits them best."

Couldn't agree more. Especially the latter half of the sentence. That's why we homeschool our kids.

I've studied in both co-ed and single-sex schools, and while there might be some educational benefits to segregation, they're more than outweighed by the social issues that crop up.

Maybe it's a culture-specific thing (I'm in India) but in my experience, 90% of girls who study in girls-only schools are awful at dealing with members of the opposite sex, whether in general or in comparison with people raised in a co-ed environment. They generally fall into one of two extremes- either just talking to a boy is considered sinful and shameful or they chase after boys to the point where nothing, not education, not their friends, not even self respect, is as important as getting male attention. They honestly don't know how to deal with boys/men as peers, equals or friends. It's just sad, really.

I just applied to a Masters in Teaching program, and I hope to teach middle school. I think we need an awareness that different STUDENTS learn differently and we need strategies for addressing different kind of learners. This is incredibly challenging, and I think about it all the time--which I think is a much better use of my time than thinking about how "girls and boys" learn differently.

What's more useful is to know how people THINK boys and girls act and learn differently, because I think a lot of teachers are unaware of the expectations they bring to the classroom based on gender and how they treat students based on those unconscious expectations.

I'm disturbed by what Poorva has said. These sort of generalizations about the lack of social skills in students in single-sex education are harmful and inaccurate. First of all, anything based on two extremes is probably inaccurate. As a women's college graduate, I do know some women who crave male attention and some who are overly chaste, but they are at the far ends of the spectrum. Also, why define single-sex education in the context of how women interact with men after they leave? My education and my life are about far more than how I go about getting male attention or what it means.

Single-sex education can be empowering and poignant and edifying, and more than anything else, it guarantees access to educational resources, both human and otherwise, to a minority that has not always had those privileges.

Thank you so much for the Sara Mead and Dana Goldstein links! On Monday, I emailed the link to the NYT article to my International and National Women's Movements class (the day's discussions centered on gendered divisions)...now I have another email to compose to them :)

Wow, Poorva, my experience has been the exact opposite.

I graduated from a single-sex (female only) high school after having attended public school my whole life.

I would echo prettymuch everything ellestar said. The women who graduated were more self-confident, better educated and more ambitious than my women friends from public school. Being a girls-only high school, the teachers that were attracted to teach there believed strongly in feminism and the capability of females. They encouraged us to be excelent in all fields of study. Likewise, there was no comparison of our performances to that of male classmates, no male classmates to dis us for being smart or speaking up, and an atmosphere where we weren't judged every second on the way we looked (all of which I experienced in public school, along with a math teacher that wouldn't give girls good grades, ever). It was a very liberating.

Single-sex education CAN be wonderful, IF it's done right.

The other thing that needs to be addressed is instituting a general culture of excellence for academic achievement.

Everyone keeps throwing around the debate about whether boys are supposed to be good at math while girls aren't. I'm not hearing anybody talk about the fact that culturally, boys aren't supposed to be good at math either. They're supposed to be good at running fast and throwing and hitting a ball. What do we call boys who are good at math and science? Nerds. Geeks. Losers. Where is the motivation to excel in these areas when this is the sort of reward it earns you? Math and science excellence are only admired in our culture when they are paired with athletic excellence. (Yeah, like curing cancer requires the ability to hit a home run.)

Girls are making advances in this area because there is a movement that is specifically telling them it's a good thing to be smart. Girls have the counter message that they are supposed to be pretty, not smart, and this is a huge disadvantage to them, but this is being actively combatted. Boys are still being told that they are supposed to be athletic, not smart, and I'm not seeing much in the way of cultural work to remedy that.

The idea of creating environments that cater to specific learning styles sounds great. If tossing a ball around during a discussion stimulates particular type of brain to better achievement, I'm all for it. That doesn't address the societal problem that boys are supposed to be all about athleticism, and boys who fall behind on that criterion are looked down on, regardless of their other accomplishments. I could easily see the same old cultural influence coming to view the ball-throwing class as being for the alpha types, and the other approaches being for the inferior remainders. If this approach starts out being framed as gender segregation, the same old stereotypes and prejudices come into play when it is moved to an integrated approach focused on the needs of the individual. In short, "Yah, yah, you got put in the girls' class."

Coming to value intellectual achievement does not have to come at the expense of valuing athletics. Recognizing that there are different kinds of accomplishment and ability helps everyone excel at their own strengths. It may sound like I'm whining about boys' issues on a feminist site, but bear in mind that a culture of valuing brains is an equal opportunity chance to excel. It will ultimately help females as well as males.

Poorva, i grew up in India and went to a girl's only school too. And surprise, surprise, I neither chased after men, nor became totally tongue tied when I met them.... I am thinking, maybe my family background and parents had something to do with it. My cousins, who went to totally coed schools all their lives, on the other hand, ended up totally shy, and one became a bit of a man-chaser, but then again it was probably more of an adolescent phase, rather than a result of their upbringing.

Most of the discussion tends to center on teaching strategies and pedagogy, but little discussion here or elsewhere genuinely focuses on the gender values held by the teachers. How can we expect schools to promote gender justice if they continue to set a poor example of egalitarian and pro-feminist values? This poor example is the lack of men in education, especially in the primary grades. It would seem that complaints centering on gender equitable curriculum or teaching methodologies have less credibility when the lack of diversity in the teacher workforce persists. Perhaps Horace Mann was right when he stated that we have precisely the kind of teachers the market has demanded. As a male and former elementary teacher, we must demand that teachers share pro-feminist values and that society actually demands it of education overall. But society has not provided the adequate resources for schools to engage in social transformation. Schooling has just enough to promote the status quo. Do not stop short and demand a shift in values when many of us do not encourage people to teach and nurture young children.

Jocelyn Samuels and Fatima Goss Graves here at the National Women's Law Center just posted their own response to the NYT mag's article on single-sex education. As they pointed out, parts of the article read like quotes from some educational primer left over from the 1950s...

I twitch whenever I read that the reason boys "suffer in school" is that schools are organized "by women according to feminine principles", i.e. sitting quietly to pay attention and taking lots of notes. These are girly activities that boys have trouble performing and thus suffer from educational delays.

Ok, last time I checked, these same skills are the basis of getting a college education. And last I checked, the vast majority of professors are male. So is there some magic transformation that boys undergo when they turn 18? Suddenly they learn like girls? Or maybe this happens upon receipt of a Phd and the young man instantly forgets that the 'best way of learning' is through activity and loudness. Nope, hierarchy, attentive listening and critical reading skills are impositions developed by women schoolteachers. Those skills were definitely not demanded for success in the prestigious private boys school of the 1800s! The headmasters of those schools definitely valued answering out of turn and hated rote learning. Because the current way of doing things was developed exclusively by women for girls and not by any men for both genders.

My apologies if this has already been mentioned.

I actually liked the way the NYT article mentioned logistics:

"...Other districts have started single-gender programs only to shut them down, as major logistical headaches outweighed the small academic gains. Lori Clark, principal at Jefferson Leadership Academies in Long Beach, Calif., which in 1999 became the first public middle school in the country to convert to a single-gender format, is in the process of reverting her school to coed. 'We just didn’t get the bang for the buck we’d been hoping for with our test scores,' Clark told me. 'Our master schedule is like one of those old Rubik’s cubes. It’s hard enough to make sure each kid gets _this_ level English class and _that_ level math class — and then we need to account for if that student is a boy or a girl? We just couldn’t have our hands tied like that.'..."

The scheduling logistics at my high school were already a mess, so I'm really glad the admins didn't also take gender into account.

For example, my high school could only offer 2 calculus classes a year. What if it had offered male and female calculus classes instead of regular and accelerated calculus classes?

How many girls would have thrived in a calculus class with no boys?

How many would have grown bored in class waiting for other girls to catch up, since they wouldn't be in separate accelerated and regular calculus classes?

How many would have conversations with their guidance counselors like
"I want to take college-level chemistry and calculus"
"You can't, they meet at the same time"
"but college-level chemistry is 4th period and there's a calculus class 5th period"
"sorry, _that_ calculus class is for boys"
?

Also, this was in a suburban school district. Imagien how much more difficult it could have been in a rural one...

"Sorry to get a bit off topic with the leveling rant, but just like splitting kids up based on 'ability' bothers me"

Right on!

It's way better to split the *classes* up and let each student mix and match according to her or his different abilities in each subject.

Yeah, even if letting all 27 15-year-olds in medium-track American history take 4 tracks of Spanish from beginner to almost-native-fluency and 2 different tracks of Latin makes it harder to put all the female ones in the same 10th grade English Lit class. ;)

Thank you! Segregating kids based on gender makes no more sense than separating them based on race.

To be honest, the whole sex-segregated schooling movement really gives me the creeps. I think it just drives people apart more and ignores all the different ways in which children learn. I think that a diverse classroom enriches an educational experience.

@ allytude and leah

I didn't mean to generalise, and I'm sorry if my comment came across that way. I'm only talking about gitls I've met who've studied in single-sex schools- most of them have turned to be one extreme or the other, but not all, and I recognize that.

I do still think, however, that nothing good can come of totally separating boys and girls for their developing years and then expecting them to be completely fine with each other in the real world.

Allytude, what part of India did you study in, if you don't mind my asking? It seems to me that there's more stigma attached to boy/girl interaction in some parts of India, and that's where part of my experience came from.

Just a quick note on my own experience in a female-only math class:

It absolutely did not promote any kind of gender normativity. I substitute taught in the classroom (7th grade math in an urban school) for a few hours and I will tell you that those young women were the farthest from the feminine stereotypes that I've ever seen. It was pretty spectacular to see girls totally comfortable with farting, burping, and getting chips all over themselves in a classroom setting (okay, maybe a little messy and gross too, but they're 13!!). I have never in my life as a substitute teacher (and I taught genderbending students, believe me, hello Long Haired Dude with Beard and Skirt and Hairy Legs!) seen this kind of comfortable ungenderedness in any school.

I knew a long-term sub at the same school who had English classes that were sex segregated and she really enjoyed her experience at this school and thought it was working well.

I now also think I should mention that the school I taught at was not entirely segregated. I have subbed in completely integrated math classes there as well as two math classes that were predominately female/male but had a few members of the opposite sex in there. I have no idea how the school determines who gets into which classes, but it seems that the parents/students have some kind of say in the program.

As far as I know only the English, math, and PE classes were seperated while all other classes and activities were co-ed.

I don't think that there's enough research in schools using the best kind of this program to judge its value, YET.

I think there's something to what avast2006 is saying. I remember watching Saved by the Bell when I was younger and being relieved that Kelly could be pretty, cool, AND a good student while the boys could either be cool like Zack or a good student like Screech. In my mind, being badly behaved and getting bad grades were connected, and girls didn't have to rebel or act up in class in order to be cool. They could write neatly and be organized and follow directions and do their homework without losing face. I can see the negative side to that on the girls' side - it probably comes from the stereotype that girls should be nice no matter what and it's not ladylike to be a mess and so on. But I was a good student, and I always wondered what I would do if I were a guy. Not to say that the boys are the only ones with a problem; in my particular case, I was lucky, and I don't think gender stereotypes or the idea that guys are intimidated by smart girls got to me (I definitely heard the latter, but acting dumb just didn't seem like an option to me). But I know not everyone has the same experience.

I went to a women's college, and it was a wonderful antidote to the sexism of twelve years of public coed education. The women I knew in college were far more self-confident and assertive, and far less deferential to men or concerned with their appearance, than any females I knew in high school. I've found that this still applies, both to current students and to alumnae I know.

Also, an anecdote about math:

A friend of mine was a math major, one of about forty on our campus. She was a tiny, delicate blonde who looked as if she should have been sipping a strawberry phosphate on the cover of Victorian sheet music, not making top grades at a Seven Sisters college.

Her fiance was a student at a nearby coed school, and they made arrangements so that he could take an exchange semester at her school and she could return the favor at his. At the coed school she was the *only* female math major, and the only woman in the higher level math courses. Even worse, the male students tried to discourage her from attending an advanced seminar on the grounds that "it's so hard, this professor is so tough, you'll never make it, shouldn't you take something else?" Her serene assurances that she'd taken all the prerequisites were brushed aside, to the point that the professor had to tell the men to back off.

And of course, she was only one in the class who got an A that semester.

I think she designs satellites or something like that these days....

"they made arrangements so that he could take an exchange semester at her school and she could return the favor at his."

Good point about how someone can still have male classmates even if she attends a women's college.

"Even worse, the male students tried to discourage her from attending an advanced seminar on the grounds that 'it's so hard, this professor is so tough, you'll never make it, shouldn't you take something else?'"

What a bunch of assholes!

"And of course, she was only one in the class who got an A that semester.

"I think she designs satellites or something like that these days...."

Cool. :)

The word is "heteronormativity", ladies. With an "r". Because the concept concerns "norms" (not "noms").

Thank you so much for this. I read this article on Sunday, and it had me steaming. The way people jump on things. Maybe women ON AVERAGE have better hearing ability than men. Then everyone jumps on it like boys are deaf or something. So stupid.